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An Okay Tuesday
Feb. 17th, 2026 11:50 pmNothing spectacular, but nothing too bad either, as the below write-up should prove:
Work – It was a fairly “meh” first day back at work after the long weekend – while it wasn’t overly busy (just a handful of calls), I did have to deal with more credit card bullshit from our credit card people, unfortunately. Specifically:
A) I had to tell them about another instance of a pledge not going through for Mysterious Reasons (though a later credit card update/catch-up payment and pledge did, fortunately)
B) And I had to send them the two long lists of payments that weren’t yet on our database (one for last year’s pledges, one for this year’s) – and then send a follow-up to make sure that the guy who replied knew that the reason the payments weren’t on was because WE HADN’T PROCESSED THEM – they’d been processed by HIS site after we put on the pledge because the date for first payment was that same day.
So that was rather frustrating. *sigh* But the rest of the day was pretty quiet – I spent it catching up on some obituaries – and my commute quite nice, actually, thanks to it being a school vacation week. Small mercies! We’ll see what happens on the credit card front tomorrow – would be NICE if some of these problems were, you know, SOLVED.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night pedaling my way through –
A) The end of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 2 - A Bed of Robo-Scorpions!” Which saw Useless Steve:
I. Finish off his time in X-13 by running the remaining tests needed to upgrade his new best friend the Aural Stealth Suit to her maximum potential! This involved –
a. The Advanced Test, which was basically “just do the same thing as you did in the basic test, only now we’re activating the laser tripwires properly” – Steve did have to avoid a few tripwires that he’d forgotten to deactivate before with the help of his scrubs, but he got to the end and got the +1 Perception upgrade for Aural! Plus along the way he picked up the recipe for the Stealth skill book and a doctor’s bag.
b. The Expert Test, which added mines to the equation, scattered around the area – fortunately, the grace period you got to deactivate them was pretty long, and Steve was able to avoid a good number of them because he’d already killed the robobrains and the laser emitters, so he was able to get to the end without much trouble and get the +1 Agility upgrade – and a level-up to Level 8, allowing him to get his Speech up to 20 and his Energy Weapons up to 25, and take another round of the Intense Training perk to up his Endurance to a whole 3, wow
c. And the Robot Compliance test, which changed the rules to “now you have to sneak up on all the robobrains and deactivate them” – Steve failed in his first attempt, because he’s so useless that even when he has decent Sneak, he has low Sneak, but the second round went better and he was able to claim the final upgrade – a boost to his speed while sneaking! And a Sneak skill book from the reward safe, which was a nice added bonus.
So now, as long as he’s wearing his Aural Stealth Suit (along with his cowboy hat and Dr. Klein glasses), Steve actually has some proper Sneaking skill and some slightly-better stats! Yay!
II. Flee the facility past all the robo-scorpions in the outer corridors, which mostly remained stubbornly unexploded because apparently he placed all his mines in bad spots – ending in Steve trying to kite one robo-scorpion to walk over some mines in the doorway right before the exit, failing, going to pick up the mines, and getting his arms exploded when the robo-scorpion chose THAT moment to walk forward and set them off. Jon was laughing mad about that, let me tell you! But Steve DID get out (after battering that scorpion to death), and he DID make the radar fence without being more injured.
III. Wrap things up by returning to The Sink to make his new Sneak skill book and read it (since he definitely had the skill to do that); repair his broken arms with the doctor’s bag he picked up and a good nap (as while sleeping won’t heal a crippled limb, it will restore the condition of a non-crippled one, and once Steve used the doctor’s bag, his arms weren’t crippled anymore); grab all the purified water out of the fridge (because it heals, and Steve needs all the healing items); and make his plans for the next adventure – visiting the X-8 facility to get the next piece of tech, and, if he could pull it off, the Y-17 medical facility to get the Sink’s auto-doc back online to repair limbs as necessary. Not to mention, he had to start thinking about eventually heading to the NORTH part of the crater to get more upgrades for the big finale...good thing he had a couple of Stealth Boys on him…
B) And the beginning of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 3 - Where We're Going, We Don't Need Legs!” Which saw Useless Steve:
I. Work on solving his “hey, my guns have a surprisingly-low amount of ammo” problem by recycling and repurposing as much ammo as he could at his workbench (with the help of his smart boy scrubs, of course)...and going to breathe in front of Dr. Dala again so she’d give him drained microfusion cells and the like (so he’s a weird breathing-based gigolo, what of it)
II. Venture outside into Big MT...and go into [CAUTION] instead of [DANGER], thus proving that all his stealth upgrades were indeed making a difference! ...up until the point where he was spotted by some lobotomites who started shooting at him, and a Nightstalker who chomped him to death. Because he’s STEVE
III. Venture outside into Big MT again and this time actually make it to X-8 via clever use of “running away from the people shooting at me” and “standing on pipes to confuse the rattlesnake-coyote trying to chomp on me;” he then proceeded to die to the Mr. Orderlys inside (the medical Mr. Handy variant) because while his X-2 Antenna club still did good work against robots, one of the Mr. Orderlys had a plasma weapon and thus just tore through poor Steve’s health
IV. Manage after some trouble to defeat the Mr. Orderlys in the opening area of X-8 – learning in the process that they don’t set off mines on the floor, presumably because they float – and then have some fun with splicing because that’s a thing you can do in this place! Specifically, he spliced a man and a robot together to create a robobrain (which made some Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy reference before being fried by the electricity at the edge of the splicing area), and – having gotten the relevant holotape from another part of the facility – a robot and a dog together to create Roxie the cyberdog! A temporary companion who is only available in X-8 and who is very very weak indeed (she doesn’t even have a sonic bark like most cyberdogs), but who will probably be useful as a distraction while attempting the actual test inside X-8. And who is an adorable cyberdog which automatically makes her awesome. (Her and the proper cyberdog companion Rex are described as meeting each other and having puppies in the ending slides if you make her. :D)
V. Manage to make it over to the Y-17 Medical Facility, beating up police cyberdogs and doing his best to avoid an annoyed roaming robobrain...only to die twice to the Mr. Orderlys and their leader, Doctor Orderly MD PHD DDS, because one of them had a plasma weapon and Doctor Orderly was a little more resistant to being booped than the average robot. At least on the second try it was a mutual kill!
So yeah – a good mix of wins and losses there. XD I left off with Steve preparing to attempt Plan C for dealing with Y-17 – burn a Stealth Boy and hope its magical invisibility kept him from being detected long enough to get the personality module for the Auto-Doc. XD We’ll see how that goes for him tomorrow!
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got through another page on this tonight, which featured:
A) Alice creeping invisibly through the basement level of the museum, following the red line through a wood-paneled hallway full of rooms she was pretty sure were offices, down the left side of a T-junction, and around to Restoration Room C, which sported a big old saber-toothed cat skull (causing her to joke to Cheshire that it was a good thing he didn’t have canines like that, as he’d never pull off a proper grin again).
B) Alice hearing a guard coming her way (after being alerted by Cheshire to listen for footsteps) and backing into a corner to avoid getting bumped into; cue a female security guard chewing some gum showing up, blowing a bubble as she looked at the skull, reporting that Restoration Room C was clear, then going on her way complaining about how she had to keep an eye on “the world’s most boring bones someone yanked out of a hole in the ground.” Drillhead and Ginger of the Insane Children were most annoyed at this, declaring both bones and digging exciting and grown-ups boring while Alice did her best not to laugh. XD
C) And Alice wondering if she needed to follow the departing guard or take another route – only for Cheshire to inform her that what she really needed to do was turn around; cue her discovering the very door she needed to get through was right behind her! Which was great, except that she didn’t yet have the code for the keypad next to it. She thus basically asked Cheshire to give her a riddle so she could figure it out and not have to go hunting through the basement for it, risking having to drop her invisibility to open doors, which he happily did –
Only to then inform her that she would have to open a door anyway, as she needed to grab something out of Restoration Room C. Whoops. XD I left things there for the night – tomorrow, Alice ducks into Restoration Room C as safely as she can, and puzzles out the riddle Cheshire gave her! Should be fun. :)
3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – I didn’t have a lot of time for this tonight, but I was able to fit in a very quick update video from Ellen over on Outside Xtra: “We Need to Talk About Outside Xtra!” No, this was not her announcing her own departure, or the channel shutting down – rather, it was her explaining that OXtra was going to be getting a revamp in the near future to bring back some of the fun that had been lost in the sea of list videos (because making those takes a long time and meant Ellen didn’t have time to make any of the other videos the channel used to be known for. ...pretty sure the fact that they never replaced Luke didn’t help). Basically, the plan for the future is to stop making list videos on Outside Xtra altogether (though Ellen will be joining the OXBoxers on their channel to help with their weekly Thursday one), and instead do more unique stuff like more Let’s Plays and video game discussions and video essays (like the one that she did about how a difficult horror game – or, perhaps more accurately, a GRINDY one – doesn’t equal a scary horror game). They’re also going to be trying to do some more interesting things over on OXBox as well, including a Resident Evil Requiem LP and some special Hitman fun in honor of the No Subtitle’s game’s 10th anniversary. AND there’s going to be a new podcast once every two weeks where everyone just discusses what games they’ve been playing and whatnot. Basically, after being slaves to the list videos for quite a while, they’re trying to mix it up a little and give OXtra its identity as the “fun channel where we do silly things” back. Personally, I don’t think it would have been bad for Ellen to just be fully absorbed into the main channel – even after all this time, it feels weird that she’s hosting OXtra all alone – but I wish them well with this experiment! Be nice to have more silly videos again.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here – well, I didn’t get as much of the queue done as I would have liked, but I did make sure to put something in for tomorrow – a glittery gif edit of Alice from A:MR by daz-e that’s been sitting on my drafts for a while. I think I need to go through my tracked tags again to find more Corpse Bride and The Smiler stuff – might try to do that tomorrow!
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had an ask from thecovenwars! Haven’t seen them in a while. Anyway, they had a seven-year-old girl wandering around in a confused daze, trying to figure out where she was – I decided I felt like sticking her in Duskwall and thus had VITD!Smiler spot her and approach her to ask if she was lost. We’ll see where this goes and for how long! Might get a little bit of a thread out of it.
*nods* Not too shabby -- and it's only just after midnight now as I wrap this up, so I can try to get to bed a little earlier than normal! How about that? We'll see if it actually translates into extra sleep or not, of course, as my brain CAN be a bit of a trash fire...but I gotta try. Night all!
Work – It was a fairly “meh” first day back at work after the long weekend – while it wasn’t overly busy (just a handful of calls), I did have to deal with more credit card bullshit from our credit card people, unfortunately. Specifically:
A) I had to tell them about another instance of a pledge not going through for Mysterious Reasons (though a later credit card update/catch-up payment and pledge did, fortunately)
B) And I had to send them the two long lists of payments that weren’t yet on our database (one for last year’s pledges, one for this year’s) – and then send a follow-up to make sure that the guy who replied knew that the reason the payments weren’t on was because WE HADN’T PROCESSED THEM – they’d been processed by HIS site after we put on the pledge because the date for first payment was that same day.
So that was rather frustrating. *sigh* But the rest of the day was pretty quiet – I spent it catching up on some obituaries – and my commute quite nice, actually, thanks to it being a school vacation week. Small mercies! We’ll see what happens on the credit card front tomorrow – would be NICE if some of these problems were, you know, SOLVED.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night pedaling my way through –
A) The end of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 2 - A Bed of Robo-Scorpions!” Which saw Useless Steve:
I. Finish off his time in X-13 by running the remaining tests needed to upgrade his new best friend the Aural Stealth Suit to her maximum potential! This involved –
a. The Advanced Test, which was basically “just do the same thing as you did in the basic test, only now we’re activating the laser tripwires properly” – Steve did have to avoid a few tripwires that he’d forgotten to deactivate before with the help of his scrubs, but he got to the end and got the +1 Perception upgrade for Aural! Plus along the way he picked up the recipe for the Stealth skill book and a doctor’s bag.
b. The Expert Test, which added mines to the equation, scattered around the area – fortunately, the grace period you got to deactivate them was pretty long, and Steve was able to avoid a good number of them because he’d already killed the robobrains and the laser emitters, so he was able to get to the end without much trouble and get the +1 Agility upgrade – and a level-up to Level 8, allowing him to get his Speech up to 20 and his Energy Weapons up to 25, and take another round of the Intense Training perk to up his Endurance to a whole 3, wow
c. And the Robot Compliance test, which changed the rules to “now you have to sneak up on all the robobrains and deactivate them” – Steve failed in his first attempt, because he’s so useless that even when he has decent Sneak, he has low Sneak, but the second round went better and he was able to claim the final upgrade – a boost to his speed while sneaking! And a Sneak skill book from the reward safe, which was a nice added bonus.
So now, as long as he’s wearing his Aural Stealth Suit (along with his cowboy hat and Dr. Klein glasses), Steve actually has some proper Sneaking skill and some slightly-better stats! Yay!
II. Flee the facility past all the robo-scorpions in the outer corridors, which mostly remained stubbornly unexploded because apparently he placed all his mines in bad spots – ending in Steve trying to kite one robo-scorpion to walk over some mines in the doorway right before the exit, failing, going to pick up the mines, and getting his arms exploded when the robo-scorpion chose THAT moment to walk forward and set them off. Jon was laughing mad about that, let me tell you! But Steve DID get out (after battering that scorpion to death), and he DID make the radar fence without being more injured.
III. Wrap things up by returning to The Sink to make his new Sneak skill book and read it (since he definitely had the skill to do that); repair his broken arms with the doctor’s bag he picked up and a good nap (as while sleeping won’t heal a crippled limb, it will restore the condition of a non-crippled one, and once Steve used the doctor’s bag, his arms weren’t crippled anymore); grab all the purified water out of the fridge (because it heals, and Steve needs all the healing items); and make his plans for the next adventure – visiting the X-8 facility to get the next piece of tech, and, if he could pull it off, the Y-17 medical facility to get the Sink’s auto-doc back online to repair limbs as necessary. Not to mention, he had to start thinking about eventually heading to the NORTH part of the crater to get more upgrades for the big finale...good thing he had a couple of Stealth Boys on him…
B) And the beginning of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 3 - Where We're Going, We Don't Need Legs!” Which saw Useless Steve:
I. Work on solving his “hey, my guns have a surprisingly-low amount of ammo” problem by recycling and repurposing as much ammo as he could at his workbench (with the help of his smart boy scrubs, of course)...and going to breathe in front of Dr. Dala again so she’d give him drained microfusion cells and the like (so he’s a weird breathing-based gigolo, what of it)
II. Venture outside into Big MT...and go into [CAUTION] instead of [DANGER], thus proving that all his stealth upgrades were indeed making a difference! ...up until the point where he was spotted by some lobotomites who started shooting at him, and a Nightstalker who chomped him to death. Because he’s STEVE
III. Venture outside into Big MT again and this time actually make it to X-8 via clever use of “running away from the people shooting at me” and “standing on pipes to confuse the rattlesnake-coyote trying to chomp on me;” he then proceeded to die to the Mr. Orderlys inside (the medical Mr. Handy variant) because while his X-2 Antenna club still did good work against robots, one of the Mr. Orderlys had a plasma weapon and thus just tore through poor Steve’s health
IV. Manage after some trouble to defeat the Mr. Orderlys in the opening area of X-8 – learning in the process that they don’t set off mines on the floor, presumably because they float – and then have some fun with splicing because that’s a thing you can do in this place! Specifically, he spliced a man and a robot together to create a robobrain (which made some Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy reference before being fried by the electricity at the edge of the splicing area), and – having gotten the relevant holotape from another part of the facility – a robot and a dog together to create Roxie the cyberdog! A temporary companion who is only available in X-8 and who is very very weak indeed (she doesn’t even have a sonic bark like most cyberdogs), but who will probably be useful as a distraction while attempting the actual test inside X-8. And who is an adorable cyberdog which automatically makes her awesome. (Her and the proper cyberdog companion Rex are described as meeting each other and having puppies in the ending slides if you make her. :D)
V. Manage to make it over to the Y-17 Medical Facility, beating up police cyberdogs and doing his best to avoid an annoyed roaming robobrain...only to die twice to the Mr. Orderlys and their leader, Doctor Orderly MD PHD DDS, because one of them had a plasma weapon and Doctor Orderly was a little more resistant to being booped than the average robot. At least on the second try it was a mutual kill!
So yeah – a good mix of wins and losses there. XD I left off with Steve preparing to attempt Plan C for dealing with Y-17 – burn a Stealth Boy and hope its magical invisibility kept him from being detected long enough to get the personality module for the Auto-Doc. XD We’ll see how that goes for him tomorrow!
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got through another page on this tonight, which featured:
A) Alice creeping invisibly through the basement level of the museum, following the red line through a wood-paneled hallway full of rooms she was pretty sure were offices, down the left side of a T-junction, and around to Restoration Room C, which sported a big old saber-toothed cat skull (causing her to joke to Cheshire that it was a good thing he didn’t have canines like that, as he’d never pull off a proper grin again).
B) Alice hearing a guard coming her way (after being alerted by Cheshire to listen for footsteps) and backing into a corner to avoid getting bumped into; cue a female security guard chewing some gum showing up, blowing a bubble as she looked at the skull, reporting that Restoration Room C was clear, then going on her way complaining about how she had to keep an eye on “the world’s most boring bones someone yanked out of a hole in the ground.” Drillhead and Ginger of the Insane Children were most annoyed at this, declaring both bones and digging exciting and grown-ups boring while Alice did her best not to laugh. XD
C) And Alice wondering if she needed to follow the departing guard or take another route – only for Cheshire to inform her that what she really needed to do was turn around; cue her discovering the very door she needed to get through was right behind her! Which was great, except that she didn’t yet have the code for the keypad next to it. She thus basically asked Cheshire to give her a riddle so she could figure it out and not have to go hunting through the basement for it, risking having to drop her invisibility to open doors, which he happily did –
Only to then inform her that she would have to open a door anyway, as she needed to grab something out of Restoration Room C. Whoops. XD I left things there for the night – tomorrow, Alice ducks into Restoration Room C as safely as she can, and puzzles out the riddle Cheshire gave her! Should be fun. :)
3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – I didn’t have a lot of time for this tonight, but I was able to fit in a very quick update video from Ellen over on Outside Xtra: “We Need to Talk About Outside Xtra!” No, this was not her announcing her own departure, or the channel shutting down – rather, it was her explaining that OXtra was going to be getting a revamp in the near future to bring back some of the fun that had been lost in the sea of list videos (because making those takes a long time and meant Ellen didn’t have time to make any of the other videos the channel used to be known for. ...pretty sure the fact that they never replaced Luke didn’t help). Basically, the plan for the future is to stop making list videos on Outside Xtra altogether (though Ellen will be joining the OXBoxers on their channel to help with their weekly Thursday one), and instead do more unique stuff like more Let’s Plays and video game discussions and video essays (like the one that she did about how a difficult horror game – or, perhaps more accurately, a GRINDY one – doesn’t equal a scary horror game). They’re also going to be trying to do some more interesting things over on OXBox as well, including a Resident Evil Requiem LP and some special Hitman fun in honor of the No Subtitle’s game’s 10th anniversary. AND there’s going to be a new podcast once every two weeks where everyone just discusses what games they’ve been playing and whatnot. Basically, after being slaves to the list videos for quite a while, they’re trying to mix it up a little and give OXtra its identity as the “fun channel where we do silly things” back. Personally, I don’t think it would have been bad for Ellen to just be fully absorbed into the main channel – even after all this time, it feels weird that she’s hosting OXtra all alone – but I wish them well with this experiment! Be nice to have more silly videos again.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here – well, I didn’t get as much of the queue done as I would have liked, but I did make sure to put something in for tomorrow – a glittery gif edit of Alice from A:MR by daz-e that’s been sitting on my drafts for a while. I think I need to go through my tracked tags again to find more Corpse Bride and The Smiler stuff – might try to do that tomorrow!
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had an ask from thecovenwars! Haven’t seen them in a while. Anyway, they had a seven-year-old girl wandering around in a confused daze, trying to figure out where she was – I decided I felt like sticking her in Duskwall and thus had VITD!Smiler spot her and approach her to ask if she was lost. We’ll see where this goes and for how long! Might get a little bit of a thread out of it.
*nods* Not too shabby -- and it's only just after midnight now as I wrap this up, so I can try to get to bed a little earlier than normal! How about that? We'll see if it actually translates into extra sleep or not, of course, as my brain CAN be a bit of a trash fire...but I gotta try. Night all!
